Chapter 11 Annie

CHAPTER 11 ANNIE

2000

Bolton Landing

The day before we were supposed to leave for Los Angeles, Amanda asked me to meet her at the boat. I was at home, staring at an empty sheet of paper, wondering what—if anything—I should write my mom by way of goodbye. It was a cold fall day; the lake wasn’t what I had in mind, but Amanda insisted.

Once we pushed away from the shore, she said, “I have something to show you,” which piqued my interest. So many years, so small a town—what was left to discover? Then she gunned the motor and for a moment the front of the boat, me inside, lifted high into the air and I thought I would topple onto her. We quickly leveled out and she grinned. She’d been doing that lately, this odd sort of showing off, like she wanted me to pay more attention to her.

Didn’t she know how tightly I was held in her orbit? I snuck a glance: she was in profile, hair blowing perfectly in the wind because that’s just how the world interacted with Amanda, casting her in its most flattering light.

“It’s coming up,” Amanda yelled into the wind. We were nearing a series of small islands in the middle of the lake. By now, we’d explored most of them, but it was all just grass and trees. “My cousin took me here last week—it’s the one island we didn’t go to!”

Amanda cut the engine, and we drifted toward a patch of sandy beach. A second later, she hopped over the side and pulled us onto shore. Her athleticism was impressive. “Look at you,” I said, awkwardly stepping out of the boat. “They should give varsity letters for that.”

We walked through a line of trees and came to the back side of the island. Up ahead was a dilapidated house—burnt red, peeling wooden slats—with a collapsed barn and unkempt grass, the overgrowth nearly obscuring a rusted grill in the side yard, a half-deflated floatie tucked behind. Each detail compounded until all I saw was the setting for a post-apocalypse movie. This was the place survivors would scavenge and find a single unopened can of dog food.

“You gotta come see this!” Amanda called from the backyard. I walked around, stepping with high knees to avoid ticks.

More apocalypse in the backyard: a zip line that started high in the tree line, passed over an aboveground pool, and ended on a rotten wooden porch. The pool was empty, its blue lining peeling in long strips. The porch was a death trap of nails and sunken planks.

Amanda was walking toward the tree line, and I trailed far behind her.

A few seconds later, she began climbing a tree, and at first, I didn’t know how it was happening so fast. Then I spotted the wooden steps affixed to the trunk, leading toward a platform.

Happily abandoning the safety of ground, that was Amanda. Physically adventurous in ways I’d never been. Like onstage when she allowed herself to be attached to a harness and lifted twenty feet in the air during a performance of Peter Pan , which nauseated me. The entire production was run by students who had about zero experience in delicately balancing humans in space. Of course, it had gone perfectly, reinforcing Amanda’s belief in her invincibility.

I was thinking of this as she reached the platform and tested a small amount of her weight with one foot, gripping the zip line with her right hand.

“Maybe let’s not do this,” I called. She pretended not to hear me.

“Amanda!” I yelled, my anxiety rising. But now she was focused on unwrapping a cord attached to what looked like bike handlebars.

I’d once complimented her daring. Is that what this was about? A performance—just for me?

She unwrapped the handlebars and was now putting more of her weight on the platform. I quickly scanned the length of the zip line. It was held taut, everything appeared to be attached.

And yet there was my heart, making its presence felt, as Amanda stepped fully onto the platform. She was gripping the handlebars with both hands. Was she—she was actually doing this?

I cupped my hands over my mouth and yelled for her to get down, then started speed walking toward her. She thought my panic was funny, laughing as she waved me back, “Annie, no, I’ll come to you—that’s the whole point!”

“How fucking cool is this!” she yelled a second later.

My last thought before Amanda leapt off the platform was: Wow, we’re actually really different.

She made a kind of Tarzan yell as she jumped. I was standing between her and the pool, about a quarter way down the zip line. She was wearing a sweater, jeans, and black Converse high-tops, and she looked strong holding herself in midair, the cut of her body surprising. She tucked her knees and looked down at me with wide eyes, her mouth a perfect O, and I realized I was being overly cautious—she wasn’t that high. She might twist an ankle, get banged up a little, nothing more.

Then she passed over me, and when I glanced up, I saw the bottoms of her sneakers, that trademark brown with a diamond cut.

The beginning of everything came a moment later. The base of the zip line, bolted to the porch however many years ago, broke free. The sound was like a whipping, like in a movie when a storm hits a boat and one of the sails comes untethered in the wind. It’s not a good noise; it’s terrifying—an undoing.

Amanda was no longer above the laws of physics; she was now at their mercy.

I spun with the sound, facing the pool, which Amanda was about to pass over. I wished I could instantly fill it. She would climb out soaking wet, and we would stumble into a hug, falling down, laughing at our close call. We’d forget it ever happened a week later.

But the only thing inside that pool was dead leaves and muck and, underneath, the hard ground. I looked up at Amanda, but now I could only see her back. I couldn’t tell if she knew what was happening.

I screamed her name, feeling the pointlessness, my helplessness. But the energy my body had instantly generated—the pure fear—needed a release.

Amanda contorted herself in the air. For a moment I thought she might be able to glide into the grass like an expert skydiver, but she contracted her body too quickly, and the cord no longer had any tension. She turned herself sideways. As she fell, now nearly parallel to the ground, her left foot caught the lip of the pool, and the impact spun her headfirst at a sickening angle. She disappeared into the pool with a muffled thud, the sound absorbed by the wet leaves.

I didn’t move. Around me the day was a cloudless blue and for a moment I tuned in to the sounds of the island, a songbird’s melody drifting from the trees, the percussion of a light breeze through leaves. The world was so, so big—endless, really—and then the sensation of it all collapsing into itself and whooshing through a pinprick, leaving me standing a few yards from that terrible pool. No sounds came from inside it. My first thought was that if she wasn’t crying, she must be okay. Maybe the wet leaves softened the fall?

“Amanda.” My voice was a gasp. I was at the side of the pool, moving slower than I wanted. I imagined if someone was watching they’d be yelling at me to fucking hurry, go, go go , but my mind had put my body in slow motion.

The pool was about my height. I pressed my toes into the grass, one, two, three , then launched myself upward, straightening my arms on the side and clumsily lifting myself over. My body was coursing with so much fear that I could feel my jaw shivering.

First, I noticed the handlebars and the cord of the zip line, slack, dangling along the far side of the pool like a downed electric line. Then I saw Amanda, on her back near the curved wall, the heel of her left foot perched a few inches up the side, and as I took in all of this, I felt relieved.

She was not mangled, or at some grotesque angle, and I spent a split second thinking maybe she’d just had the wind knocked out of her. The leaves were muddy and layered with God-knows-what, and I thought about how pissed Amanda would be having that slime all over her.

But then I saw her eyes, and that’s when the cycle of fear returned, revved up even higher, and I knelt next to her, touched her arm. Her eyes, they were so wide, and there was so much white they looked like cue balls, and she was staring straight up like she’d never seen the world before.

Then she rolled her eyes to the side to look at me, and the way it happened, like they were detached from the rest of her body, caused a wave of nausea so severe that I launched myself up and vomited a few feet away. A moment later, I stumbled back to her.

“Can you hear me?” I grabbed her hand. Her lips were moving, but no words came out. “Can you feel this?” She blinked. I squeezed again. “What about now?” No blink. My mind was scrambling, desperate for a foothold.

“Amanda, what’s going on, what happened?” I asked, my voice careening along the edge, desperate. What did the blink mean? What did no blink mean? Did any of it mean anything? I said nothing for what seemed like a long time but was probably only a few seconds, scanning her body for some obvious sign of breaking. I squeezed her leg, just above the knee, said, “Can you feel this?,” but she just stared at the sky. That endless blue above us. I saw a tear collect at the corner of her eye and slowly roll across her temple, disappearing into her hair.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, then darted over to the ladder, climbed up and out, then sprinted back to the boat.

For a short stretch of time, everything I did was exactly what needed to be done. I dragged the boat into the water, I gunned it back to the dock, I ran to the closest motel office and told the manager to call 911, which he did, handing the phone to me once he had someone on the line. I told them everything I knew: the small island, the red house, the broken zip line, the pool, Amanda motionless and blinking, please hurry as fast as you can.

The operator assured me emergency services were on their way, and I ran back down to the boat and I swear to God I had every intention of going back to Amanda. I even dragged the boat into the water. Then my mind started spinning everything forward. Suddenly I was gulping air, but still couldn’t get enough into my lungs. I abandoned the boat, left it half in the water, and walked the mile to where Brando was parked, ducking off the road whenever a car passed, like I was some kind of fugitive. Gradually, my breathing calmed, then I was climbing into the driver’s side of the car. I grabbed the rearview mirror to look at my broken reflection, stunned that I’d forgotten the glass was cracked. What else could I forget without even trying?

Turns out the last meaningful words I said to Amanda were “Can you feel this?” And the answer was no, no she couldn’t.